Music for Manti: A Hoax Playlist

One of the minor pleasures of the Manti Te’o situation has been to watch people on Twitter nominate songs for an imaginary Te’o playlist. Here are our suggestions.

The Records, “Girls That Don’t Exist” (1979)

The Records are one of the great lesser-known treasures of power pop, a band that some people call the British Big Star but that we like to call The Records. Their big hit was “Starry Eyes,” but this is almost as good, and slightly more topical.

Phil Ochs, “Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore” (1969)

Taken from Ochs’s “Rehearsals For Retirement” album, a bottomless pit of despair with plenty of gallows humor, this song is about Lenny Bruce. But you could tell people it’s about Lennay Kekua. It’ll be a hoax!

Joe Cocker, “Catfish” (1976)

Bob Dylan co-wrote “Catfish” with Jacques Levy but did not include it on “Desire.” Instead, it showed up years later on the Bootleg Series. The song is about the pitcher Catfish Hunter, who is called “million-dollar man” because of the unprecedented size of his contract. Joe Cocker, who as a British man may or may not know much about baseball, recorded it on his “Stingray” album. It’s on this list because “catfish” is now the generic term used for an online identity hoax that includes some kind of romantic intrigue, thanks to the documentary of the same name by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, which has now become a reality series on MTV.

David Lynch, “Imaginary Girl” (2006)

Taken from the soundtrack to Lynch’s film “Inland Empire,” this song sounds like it’s being narrated by the angriest dog in the world (“She is an imaginary girl, a fiction / I’m a dog on a chain, a prisoner”).

The Castaways, “Liar Liar” (1965)

Perhaps the eeriest, most propulsive, and best sixties song about deception—thanks in large part to Bob Folschow’s falsetto vocals—”Liar Liar” has been featured in various movies (including the 1967 quasi-feminist film “It’s a Bikini World”). Here, it’s on TV, but not really: this performance is from an episode of “Gilligan’s Island,” where the three women, as the Honey Bees, danced to a song called “You Need Me.” In this clip, the audio has been replaced by “Liar Liar.”

John Prine, “A Star, A Jewel, and a Hoax” (1970)

This rare Prine song didn’t appear on an album until some of his earliest recordings were collected for “The Singing Mailman Delivers,” in 2011. This version is sung by a fan. The exact subject of the song isn’t quite clear, so we’re going to assume that Prine was psychic, that the star was Te’o (“He’s a star / but he didn’t get as far as those who idolized his ways and means”), and the jewel was Kekua (“She’s a jewel but her tactics are so cruel…she lives another life but not her own in an imaginary throne in the sky”).

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